Sunday, October 27, 2013

Remind You of Anyone?

Six Principles Of
Propaganda Lenin Used To Consolidate Power

By MONICA SHOWALTER
Posted 09/20/2013 07:12 PM ET

Having attained power in late 1917 on a raft of promises — land to Russia's
peasants, bread to Russia's starving cities and peace to Russia's World War
I-weary soldiers — V.I. Lenin was able to dispense with every one of them by
advancing civil war from 1918 to 1921 to justify his acts by crisis.

In place of promises of liberty and rights, Lenin gave Russians propaganda,
empowering the Bolsheviks to govern through knoutish messages, if not the
barrel of the gun. In so doing, he sought to undermine Russia's weak democracy
and to transform society fundamentally.

"The Russian Revolution was permeated with propaganda of a forceful and
brutal kind," wrote historian Dmitri Volkogonov in his 1995 "Lenin:
Life and Legacy," based on materials briefly available from the Soviet
archives.

The propaganda was used not so much to win people over with ideas but by
bludgeoning them with coercion, repression and making examples. "The type
of propaganda that the Bolsheviks carried out is absolutely central to our
understanding of the regime they created," wrote Peter Kenez in "The
Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization,
1917-1929."

A number of patterns emerged:

1. Ends Justify The Means

The broken promises that Lenin's regime started delivered just the opposite.
He guaranteed a free press, but in his first two days of communist rule he
halted it, ordering opposition newspapers shut down and censorship re-instituted.
He called it temporary, but it wasn't.

Lenin also won power with promises to broaden land ownership, but
immediately issued 60 decrees to end private property, including a secret
directive to destroy state archives of land, factory and building title deeds
before anyone could protest. To war-weary soldiers, Lenin promised peace. But
he immediately impressed them into the new Red Army, holding their families
hostage to ensure their loyalty.

All this was justified in his mind by one idea: consolidating power. In
setting off civil war, Lenin put Russia on a war footing that justified any
atrocity, broken promise or use of propaganda that served to establish
communism.

2. Firstest With The Mostest

Besides implementing a strategy of lies, Lenin also was quick to seize the
semantic high ground in the same way his military commander, Leon Trotsky, was
swift to seize territory.

Like Nathan Bedford Forrest, the "firstest with the mostest"
general in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, Lenin swiftly
altered and manipulated the meanings of words, intellectually disarming
opponents.

As early as 1903, at a party congress, Lenin won a membership issue by a
single vote. But from then on he called his faction "the Bolsheviks,"
or majoritarians, and his opponents "Mensheviks," or minoritarians.
It didn't matter that the Bolsheviks never were a true majority among Russia's
revolutionaries; what mattered was the perception of power.

Lenin repeated the tactic by dubbing Bolsheviks "Reds" to signal
an affinity with the bloody violence of the French Revolution, while their
battlefield opponents were saddled with "Whites" to link them with
the discredited French Bourbon dynasty. Lenin also took title to the word
"democracy," disarming opponents who were then unable to project a
coherent message. By controlling words, Lenin controlled perceptions of
reality.

3. Never Let A Crisis Go To Waste

As propagandists, however, the Bolsheviks were not especially persuasive.
"The Russian socialists have contributed nothing to the theoretical
discussion of the techniques of mass persuasion," wrote Kenez. They
"never looked for and did not find devilishly clever methods to influence
people's minds, to brainwash them."

Their newspapers were notoriously gray, mechanically spouting simple, choppy
messages such as "All Power to the Soviets!" "Create a New
Socialist Man!" and "Bread! Peace! Land!"

What they were expert at was making these gray organs into monopolies.
Instead of persuading with words, Lenin simply closed other papers, leaving
only the Bolshevik publications. The resultant monopoly intensified the impact
of his Bolshevik message, according to historian Robert Service.

4. Demonization

In denouncing opponents, Lenin was obsessive, virulent and personal, calling
them "bloodsuckers," "insects," "spiders,"
"leeches" and "vampires." The bourgeois were
"ex-people." The murder of Czar Nicholas II and his family was termed
"a humane act."

Then there were "hoarders," "wreckers,"
"saboteurs" and, worst of all, "Kulaks" — the prosperous
and industrious peasants of whom Lenin spoke only "with the most seething
hatred," as Volkogonov put it.

But Lenin rarely made such statements in public. Volkogonov discovered most
of these characterizations secretly hidden in Soviet archives. In public, Lenin
wanted to be pictured as a jolly apostle of Marxism.

5. Propaganda of Example

Perhaps the most disturbing means of propaganda against Russia's mostly
illiterate population was the use of example as part of a reign of terror.
Public hangings and shootings served as well as any written material to force
Russians into submission. "These swine have to be dealt with so that
everyone will remember it for years," Lenin wrote.

Terror wasn't confined to those who defied Lenin. "We must execute not
only the guilty. Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even
more," wrote Lenin's commissar for justice, according to historian Brian
Crozier in his 1999 "The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire."

To reinforce the Bolsheviks' monopoly of ideas, churches were targeted for
destruction because Russian peasants believed what they heard there. Sacred
objects were looted and saints' relics tossed into the dirt as priests were
shot. Only hollow husks remained as reminders that the old faith was now dead.

According to Volkogonov, Lenin ordered the use of poison gas on at least one
village before it was leveled. "The dictatorship means — take note of this
once and for all — unrestrained power based on force, not law," wrote
Lenin.

6. Blame Your Predecessor

As happened anytime socialism ever had been tried, it was a failure. Lenin's
much-desired civil war cost 13 million lives and his ruinous economic policies
triggered the famine of 1921-1922. YouTube has many videos of Lenin speaking,
with the salient feature being his propensity to blame his predecessor, the
Czar, for the economic havoc.

Eventually, he would have to backtrack on communism to hold on to power. But
error was never admitted and his New Economic Plan proved just a breather ahead
of even worse horrors to come under Joseph Stalin.